Trivia

Difficulty

Suspended has a number of preset difficulty levels, increasing (or decreasing) the difficulty of the game as a whole. There was also a "custom" difficulty setting, which allowed you to manually set various parameters in the game. (At which turn do the earthquakes happen? At which turn does the coolant system fail? At which turn does the human troubleshooter-team arrive? What is the initial positions of the six robots? And so on.)

But, humorously, there was also a pre-set "Impossible" difficulty setting, and it lived up to its word - if you chose this setting, the sun explodes within the first few turns, dooming the entire planet. Infocom (jokingly) offered a reward to anyone who could complete the game on the Impossible setting. Needless to say, nobody ever won that contest.

Extras

The game originally shipped with a plastic mapboard of the facility and 5 vinal counters for the robots. This was to help you visualize where everybody was during the game.

Statistics

(From The New Zork Times Vol.3 No.2 Spring 1984)

Some statistics about Suspended:

Apparent number of rooms (those seen by the player): 61

Number of rooms: 63 (for various arcane programming reasons, some locations are inaccessible to the player)

Number of different ways to die: 6 (this refers to you, the person in the cylinder, not the individual robots)

Number of words in vocabulary: 676

Number of takeable objects: 32

Awards

Computer Gaming World

November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #58 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list